....it's about all the other "stuff" that I've been doing.

Weebly's stats claim that this blog gets 600-700 hits per week. Maybe most of them are bots or webcrawlers, but I have to presume there are some Real Human Beings reading this thing. From reading these blog posts, those RHBs might be led to believe that I am always flipping, and that I am always rocking it.

Nope. Not true. I have always tried to be honest about the actual performance and attitude of my students. In my previous post of Feb 15, I told you that the average grade on a major assessment was 84 (B). Granted, that was a subjectively graded open-response task, but still it demonstrates that we do not have 100% achievement here.

Perhaps I have not been sufficiently honest and transparent about other aspects of my life. Sorry, but this won't be a gossipy/melodramatic post: my marriage is fine, I still have a job, no trip to rehab, etc.... Still, I feel like I owe the RHBs a little more description about the other balls that I'm juggling in the air this year.

Last week was a school vacation week for Massachusetts and much of the northeast U.S. We took our annual family trip to DisneyWorld from Tues the 19th to Mon the 26th. I did not completely unplug (the Twitter and GMail apps remained on my phone this year), but it is the only full week of the calendar year when I do absolutely zero unit/lesson planning. Yeah, that's right: I get more done during the summer vacation weeks because I have no chill whatsoever. Well, just a little bit. In February. :) The burst of vitamin D is really helpful, and it gives us something to look forward to during the darkest winter days.

​What else is going on in my life between blog posts??

• planning a flipped conference in June, which is way more work than I expected BUT also rewarding in terms of the people I have already met --- doors open in just under 4 months!
• finished a unit on the executive & legislative branches...
• ...starting a brand-new unit on Action Civics that has me alternately excited & terrified, because it means giving power to each class of students to choose a community issue and apply their civic knowledge to seek solutions
• continued work with the SSChat Network....
• ....and new membership in the iCivics Educator Network
• my youngest child signing up for courses for 9th grade next year ..... ACK! Am I that old?! Is she???
  
• Related realization: we will only have 2 more of those February vacations in Florida, because in 2022 my son will be at college!! [heart thumps to the floor]

         It is winter in New England. 
         As Facebook has been reminding me with "Your Memories" notifications the past few days, the past several years have brought some hefty snowstorms to this area. I have blogged earlier about the detrimental impact of snow days even though you might think that flipping would make school attendance irrelevant. Au contraire!  2019 has been nearly bereft of snow around here, while the Midwest and Northwest have suffered most of all. Last year we got slammed in March, so I am not yet declaring the end of winter.
          We have 1 more week before February Vacation . That is my only full week of vacation of the entire calendar year. We go to DisneyWorld and I switch my brain off (as much as possible) as  soon as we enter the taxi to the airport. I don't do any lesson planning or educational research and I have no control about timetables, transportation, or anything else for the next several days ... as a control enthusiast, I welcome the short brain break. It's really my only week off of the whole year, because I'm also productive during the summer.
​         However, I have to work a little extra hard before the vacation week to make sure that I have a good wrap-around plan to work for the days before & after. It doesn't help that the week after February Vacation is pockmarked by an assembly, NAEP testing, and a math placement test. Waah, waah, whine, whine, you don't really care about all that. 
           
         Without boring you, dear reader, with all the details ... here are the 3 project options I will offer students on Wednesday as we wrap up a unit about the executive & legislative branches:

​           There are lots of good reasons not to change class systems in January, but sometimes you just have gotta do it. We have a stupid little 3 day re-entry week starting tomorrow, so I don't plan to pull the trigger right away. I've got a few more days to finalize and polish the plan, but it's pretty much set.
          I have written elsewhere in this blog and presented at several conferences about this flipped mastery system of in-class quizzes to verify students know what they "Need2Know" before getting into the deeper stuff. Parents like it, special education staff seem to like it too, and returning students always respect it too.
Here is what I hope to gain from an assessment shake-up:

• Avoid the panic of winter when snow days impact (or threaten to affect) my plans. We have 3 straight months when that's a possibility. When I have in-class quizzes, they get bumped by snow days (or, again, I might have to prepare for just in case it will happen). That always slows down my curriculum progress and momentum. If my checks for understanding are online instead of in-class, then I should get less heavily impacted by the weather ... as long as we don't lose electrical power! 
• Get more in-class time to work/meet with students instead of assessing them so often. It's an easy data trap to fall into: I know what they don't know...but when can I get to actually do something about that? When I spend about 1 class per week isolated from students (while they take the quiz and while I'm feverishly scoring them before the class period ends), that makes the other classes so precious. Getting more 1:1 time was supposed to be part of the point of flipping! I see that I've gotten away from that.
• For this unit, I imagine having basically 2 kinds of class period. A) Start with a short video or reading together (or referencing a recent flipped lesson), then dive into class discussion for ~20 minutes, with a few minutes of debrief / reflection before the bell ... and B) mostly workshop time for an independent-choice project, which is when I get to have those 1:1 conferences. That structure is much easier to plan for than the 1/2 assessment-1/2 class activity system that I have been struggling to design effectively.
• By making open-response online assessments of the flipped lesson (with Edpuzzle, GoogleForms, or Schoology), I shouldn't need to stress so much about creating videos that fit the specific quiz questions and objectives; I could also offer multiple info sources for these open-response assessments. That might lead to better and easier differentiation than I have been able to manage lately. Maybe that's why people make fun of me for how long I've spent on video production.
• Finally, the upcoming government unit needs flexibility that the Need2Know system doesn't always provide. News events are changing so quickly that I need the ability to switch tomorrow from a workshop day to an article-reading/discussion day. I imagine that I can move online assessment deadlines much more smoothly than the in-class quiz dates, and that I can change the topic/focus as needed as well.

​
    OK, those are some of the pros. I'm sure there are cons to this plan as well. That's partly why I am blogging about it today: so Future Self can see where I went wrong this week! For students who really liked and just got used to the "regular" system, this is not good news. (Of course, it might really help some kids who were struggling with the in-class quizzes!)
     A big reason why I avoided the Edpuzzle-style assessment of understanding is the issue of academic honesty: How do I know these students really know it? But I've got to face it: there are flaws in the paper-pencil quiz approach as well. Kids still sometimes just cram-and-forget.
  OK, I have not yet convinced myself that this is a bad idea. Sometimes that actually does happen while I'm blogging, and usually it's only the final draft that gets published -- not the series of thoughts that led me there. I trust that it's a good idea for me to be designing the unit at the same time as I'm devising this assessment change. It's not like I'm doing this in the middle of that unit! Now I better publish this post and switch gears to unit design! My vacation is so totally over....

      Many people think that flipped classes thrive on school cancellations. "All your stuff is online, so that must be great, right?" Well, actually no. Snow days still impact learning, and I could argue it's worse for flippers ... unless you plan just right.
         First, let me describe the trials and travails of snow day drama....

       It begins with a weather report. You hear about it from a friend, or a blurb on the radio, or maybe "Winter Storm Watch" pops up on your phone as you're walking out the building one Tuesday afternoon. If it's just 2 or 3 inches of snow then you know they won't cancel (unless you live somewhere like Tennessee or Georgia where an inch of snow paralyzes the community). But if it's around 6 inches in the forecast then you've got a good chance.  Timing also matters a lot: a snowstorm that starts around 1 or 2 pm will not cancel school if it's over by midnight. 
          So we live through 1 or 2 days of confusion and rumors-- "I heard we might get 12 inches!"  "Channel 7 said that it might go out to sea and we'll get almost nothing"  "We might be on the rain-snow line for this storm..." -- and the uncertainty impacts your lesson planning. You do the best you can in the couple of days before The Storm, but these questions plague you:

• Should I change that assignment due date?
• Maybe we shouldn't do that activity today, in case we can't debrief it tomorrow.
• Would this classwork be okay as a homework item instead?
• Do I have enough ibuprofen at home to survive all that shoveling??

          
      The phone call comes from the superintendent's office. Some simply announce the cancellation (or occasionally a 2-hour delayed start) and others explain their reasoning.  When the storm is huge (10+ inches on the way), we get the call as early as 4PM; usually they wait until the 5-6 AM hour on the morning of.  

asdf  Many hours of the snow day itself are enjoyable, but that's not what this post is about.

      The main purpose of flipped learning is to activate and invigorate the shared learning space: class time.   When you lose that time, then you lose (or postpone) that learning.  The video lessons do not replace me and they cannot replicate the classroom experiences where deeper learning takes place.  If I am clever enough and the stars align, then I can schedule a video homework assignment during the snow day ... but I cannot fully assess and apply their understanding until we're all back at school.
      For example, my students are currently working on improving a specific discussion skill during our "Creating the Constitution" unit. A few days ago they learned* from a 9-minute homemade video about the purpose, issues, conditions of the Philadelphia Convention.  I prepared 2 primary-source readings that I would scaffold and support with students last week, and they would be the basis for deep class discussion about the Executive Branch and the Federalists vs Anti-Federalists ratification debate -- plus connections with current events.  You cannot replicate that practice in the online world. (Discussion boards are a completely different animal than face-to-face conversation, so don't even try....)
       In past winters, other snow days have impacted a project-based learning activity, a classroom simulation, or another shared learning space experience that cannot be 'flipped' into homework.  I blogged about my struggles in the epic winter of 2015 in real time.  

       The inescapable lesson is that flipped learning does not replace the teacher, and video lessons will never replace the teacher. As a corollary, we see that flipping adds value to class time and adds anxiety to the teacher who loses this time.


​* Claim supported by quiz results below. In addition to the 39 "A" grades, 27 students scored a "B", which reflects proficient understanding (accurate but light on some factual recall).  Seven students haven't taken it yet because of illness/absence, and another seven students scored a 60 or lower, which means they need teacher intervention...another casualty of the snow days.

       I know that's not a common thing, but it is totally flipping true.  
​
    Today I spent almost every minute from 8:00 to 3:00 in a school conference room with my 8th grade team colleagues. (I know that's not a common thing, either.) Parents had signed up for 15-minute slots, and we basically had a revolving door of mothers & fathers coming to talk with us about their child.  We feel kind of punchy by the afternoon from the lack of oxygen, over-familiarity with each other's comments, and our unfamiliarity with sitting still for seven straight hours.
       Once again, no parent complaints about my flipped classroom method.  
       Once again, there were several comments like "I've seen you in some of your videos!"
      Once again, I had various things to say about children's performance with speaking, listening, working groups, recalling information, synthesizing ideas, creating products, solving problems, and applying organization skills.  We do it all in my class, so I observe them in diverse settings and situations.

       Meanwhile, students were in our classrooms following a regular schedule -- traveling from substitute to substitute teacher.  That is far from ideal, and I'm sure it was some kind of a circus upstairs although my classroom did not look too bad:

          Haha!  Just kidding. I don't have a comfy butterfly chair.

        Anyway, I needed a rock-solid sub plan for today.  This week's flipped lesson is the first time all year that students are watching a video that Mr. Swan did not produce (!).  One is a 5-minute Youtube clip from a History Channel documentary (fair use!) and the other is a segment from an Annenberg Classroom video series.  I don't believe that I could make something better, so we use these overlapping videos to teach about the post-war situation in 1780s America.  There are several categories of problems we want students to recognize:  many states were in conflict with each other,  the Articles of Confederation created a super-weak national legislature,  and endebted veterans & farmers were gearing up for violent resistance. Last year, many students had lots of problems with learning from these videos.  I don't think it's just the content; it was my presentation of the task.
       Today, they had to watch the clips once WITHOUT taking notes and WITHOUT knowing the specific topics they need to know.  I hope that allowed them to absorb the general situation (America is in trouble), rather than play-pause-write-play-pause-write in their usual choppy disjointed way.  After 10-12 minutes, in which they should have watched on laptops at their own pace*, students could signal to the substitute to ask for the notes sheet, which lists the 3 topics I gave in the previous paragraph.  Let's see how this turns out!

* I considered having students watch together on the projector screen, but that defeats a major purpose of flipping: individual pacing for learning.